✅ This article contains no plot spoilers — it's about forbidden magic traditions as a system. Read on.
The Codex of Arcani recognises only one legitimate form of human magic: Mind Magic, as practised by members of the Conclave. Everything outside that boundary is, to varying degrees, illegal, dangerous, and actively hunted.
This article covers the magical traditions that exist beyond the Conclave's authority — some persistent despite centuries of suppression, others still poorly understood even by those hunting them.
Witchcraft is the oldest and most widespread illegal magical tradition in the human world. It is a female-only discipline, passed from practitioner to practitioner outside any formal institution, based on two interlocking practices: the preparation of complex potions and the conducting of rituals — some of them elaborate and symbolic, others involving animal or human sacrifice.
Unlike Mind Magic, witchcraft has no unified theory and no standardised method. Two witches trained in different traditions may work in ways that appear entirely unrelated. What they share is the underlying mechanism: magical effects produced through material preparation and ritual action rather than through incantation and mental discipline. The Conclave finds this theoretically disreputable. It does not find it ineffective.
Not every woman with a herb garden and a reputation for remedies is a witch in the Conclave's classification. Folk healing, herbal preparation, and minor superstitious ritual are ubiquitous throughout the Empire, deeply embedded in rural and coastal communities, and largely ignored by Conclave investigators who have more pressing concerns. The Creed may frown at sea-spirit charms and harvest blessings, but it does not report them. The Conclave does not pursue them.
The threshold for classification is meaningful power and, most decisively, evidence of ritual practice — particularly brutal ritual. Animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, elaborate ceremonies designed to channel forces beyond normal comprehension: these are what Conclave investigators look for. The line between tolerated folk practice and prosecutable witchcraft is not always perfectly clear, and it is drawn by Conclave assessors whose judgements are not subject to civilian appeal. Ambiguous cases exist. They are resolved in the direction of caution more often than mercy.
What is unambiguous is what happens once the classification is made. If the Conclave determines that a woman is practising witchcraft — not brewing remedies, not following grandmother's customs, but genuinely working power through ritual — the investigation ends and the legal process begins. It is a short process. Pardon is theoretically possible. In practice, a woman the Conclave has assessed as a working witch has already been judged. The formal verdict follows.
The knowledge of this is one reason that genuine witchcraft communities are careful. The other reason is that they have survived this long by being careful.
Witchcraft survives for the same reason most suppressed traditions survive: it requires no formal institution to transmit. A witch needs no school, no library, no master beyond whoever taught her. The knowledge passes through families, through small communities, through single practitioners working in isolation. It is harder to exterminate than any organised movement, because there is nothing central to destroy.
It is also, in its more accessible forms, genuinely useful — particularly in communities far from Conclave resources, where a local practitioner offering healing, pest deterrence, or weather reading fills a real need. The line between tolerated folk practice and prosecutable witchcraft is one the Conclave draws pragmatically, based on the power and danger of what it finds.
Witchcraft is one of the very few issues on which the Conclave and the Imperial Creed agree completely, for entirely different reasons.
The Conclave's objection is technical and professional. Witchcraft is the use of real power by untrained practitioners through imprecise methods with inadequate theoretical understanding of what they are doing. In the Conclave's assessment, this is not merely illegal — it is dangerous in the way that a layperson working with volatile materials without understanding their properties is dangerous. The risk is not only to the practitioner. A spell that fails unpredictably in an incantation can be contained. A ritual that goes wrong has no such boundaries.
The Creed's objection is theological. Witchcraft, in Creed doctrine, is not merely unauthorised magic — it is service to the Unmaker. The Unmaker is the Creed's concept of absolute evil: the force that opposes the Divine Sovereign's order, that works through corruption, deception, and unclean power. Rituals involving sacrifice, in particular, are held by the Creed to be invocations of the Unmaker's influence, regardless of what the practitioner believes she is doing or summoning. The Creed does not consider ignorance of this to be a mitigating factor.
The combined weight of Conclave enforcement and Creed condemnation makes witchcraft the most dangerous open secret in the Empire. It exists. Everyone who needs to know this knows it. It is hunted by both institutions with a thoroughness that the other forbidden arts rarely receive.
Under the Codex of Arcani, the penalty for witchcraft is death. Pardon is possible in theory and vanishingly rare in practice. The standard Conclave position is that a practitioner who has reached the level of ability necessary to come to Conclave attention has already demonstrated that she cannot safely be released, retrained, or absorbed into any legitimate structure. Forced apprenticeship — the softer verdict available for unlicensed Mind Magic users — is not offered. The disciplines are too different for it to apply, and the Conclave has shown no inclination to develop a method.
Necromancy is the manipulation of death, the dead, and the processes of dying. It is prohibited by the Codex of Arcani and considered by the Conclave to be among the most dangerous of the forbidden arts — not primarily because its practitioners are numerous, but because its effects, when they work, are profoundly difficult to reverse or contain.
The Conclave's theoretical understanding of Necromancy is incomplete, which the scholars find professionally irritating and practically significant. What they know is documented in restricted archives. What they do not know is one of the reasons the hunting of Necromancers is given priority.
Necromancy persists in the Empire's margins and operates more openly in the Wild Baron Lands.
Blood Magic — known in Conclave scholarship as dark biomancy — is the forbidden counterpart to one of Mind Magic's legitimate disciplines. Conclave-trained mages practice biomancy in its sanctioned form: healing injuries, accelerating recovery, temporarily enhancing physical endurance and strength. It is among the most valued practical skills in the Conclave's repertoire, deployed in field hospitals and by court physicians alike.
Blood Magic takes the same underlying discipline and corrupts it. Where sanctioned biomancy works with the body's natural processes, Blood Magic works against them — twisting flesh and bone into configurations that have no natural equivalent, and using blood itself, shed and spent, as the fuel that powers the working. In its lower applications it produces effects that are disturbing but contained. At greater ambition and ability, its practitioners can produce changes in themselves or others that are permanent, severe, and in the Conclave's documented records, deeply difficult to look at.
The sustained practice also changes the practitioner. Conclave records on this subject are restricted, terse, and consistent: something happens to those who use blood as fuel over time. What exactly happens is described in terms that suggest the scholars who wrote the records preferred not to be more specific.
Blood Magic is prohibited by the Codex of Arcani. It persists at the Empire's margins and operates more openly in the Wild Baron Lands.
Shamanism is the most widespread magical tradition outside the Conclave's authority, practised across many of the hill tribes north of the Empire and present in small numbers throughout the northern Imperial provinces closest to the Hill Country. It is illegal under the Codex of Arcani — but barely enforced, rarely prosecuted, and treated by the Conclave with professional dismissal rather than genuine alarm.
Shamanic practice operates through ecstatic ritual: the shaman uses a combination of specialised music, rhythmic movement, and carefully prepared herbal substances to enter an altered state through which they claim to commune with spirits of nature — entities associated with weather, terrain, animals, and the living world. In this state, the shaman draws power from those spirits and channels it into effects: healing, weather-reading, protection, and occasionally direct harm.
The Conclave's position on shamanism is that it works — imprecisely, unreliably, and by mechanisms that resist theoretical explanation — and is practised by people with no understanding of what they are handling. This makes it annoying rather than dangerous. A shaman producing erratic weather effects in a hill village is not a threat to the Imperial order. A coven of witches in a trade city is. The Conclave deploys its attention accordingly.
Punishments under the Codex for shamanic practice are significantly lighter than for the other forbidden arts — typically confinement, prohibition from practice, or expulsion from Imperial territory, rather than death. In the northern provinces where shamanism is culturally embedded and practitioners are not organised, the Conclave often settles for a warning. Repeat or egregious offenders are handled more firmly. Organised shamanic groups drawing significant numbers of followers attract closer scrutiny.
The hill tribes themselves are not monolithic in their practice. Many follow shamanic traditions. Some have adopted the Imperial Creed, either through genuine conversion or proximity and trade. A few maintain entirely different traditions of their own. The diversity of the Hill Country resists any simple description, which is part of why the Empire has never successfully absorbed it.
The Wind-Callers of the Rulen are, in practical terms, shamanic practitioners — and considerably more powerful ones than most. Their legal status is unique: see The Conclave.
The Wind-Callers of the Rulen occupy a unique legal position: technically not classified as magical practitioners at all, by virtue of a legal argument accepted under political pressure and maintained with mutual discomfort by both parties.
For full detail, see The Conclave.
Heart Magic is an extremely rare and poorly understood form of magic specific to certain individuals, unclassified by the Codex of Arcani. Its legal status within the Empire is genuinely ambiguous — the Codex's categories were written around known traditions, and Heart Magic fits none of them cleanly.
For full detail, see Heart Magic and Lia Doriandi.
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